Tag Archives: beach

When I received the Journalism 215 syllabus in my email during those last few weeks of summer, I instantly felt a little overwhelmed. It was 14 pages long. Senior year shouldn’t be stressful, right? How was I going to survive this semester? I was a writer not a videographer, photographer, or designer.

As it turns out, I am all of those things.

It just took some time. I had to check my pride a lot. Often times I had to use plan B, plan C, or even plan D when plan A didn’t work out. In the end this class was a very humbling experience. Looking back at all my assignments I’m so proud of my visible progress. I’m actually sad to be finished with this class. That is something so rare for me. It really did feel like a journey. Continue reading →

When we had first got the assignment I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot for our photo essay. My plan A was to shoot my friend’s birthday party in Champaign over the weekend but at the last minute I decided to go home to spend some time with my family. On to plan B.

I love shooting outside and my family was heading to the beach so decided to capture the day. I was really happy with the shots and audio I got. I ended up taking over 200 photos, which I think ended up being a bad idea ultimately when trying to match my sounds to photos. Also narrowing my shots down to the 12 that told the story the best was difficult. Overall, I am happy with how the photos captured the atmosphere of Labor Day weekend at the beach.

Editing this time around was much less stressful. I wasn’t so far behind the rest of class like during assignment one. A problem I had however, was that I did not record enough sound to cover my entire video. I had about 40 seconds of sound to use for about 68 seconds of stills. I should have planned better. Also, much of the noise at the beach was overpowered by the strong winds so it was hard to get a variation of distinctive sounds. I could have done much better at finding powerful sounds to tell the story.

All in all things felt much easier this time around. Moving forward I want to try to plan better so I am prepared during the editing process. I also want to take more shots in difficult lighting because so far I’ve had excellent natural lighting. Maybe next time I will try to take some night shots.

You can see my photo essay without sound here. You can see my photo essay with sound here.

For our second assignment we had put together a photo essay that had a constant theme and told a story.

On Sunday, I decided to take my camera to the beach because I knew there would probably be a lot going on there given that it was Labor Day weekend. I wanted to show how people were enjoying one of the last weekends of summer. I was really happy with the shots I got. I ended up taking over 200 photos. Narrowing down my shots down to the 12 that told the story the best was the hardest part.

In my first video there is no audio, then I added some audio to the second video. The sound I added helped to capture the atmosphere of the beach. It was very windy so a lot of the sound is of the strong blowing winds. The wind overpowered much of the other natural sounds. However, I did also get some great audio of the water hitting the shore.

You can see my photo essay without sound here. You can see my photo essay with sound here.